Think you can predict better than the experts? Well, here’s your chance! We are excited to announce the launch of the “PT Challenge” on PunditTracker.com.

When you vote on a pundit’s call on PunditTracker, you are effectively making a prediction. This enables us to grade users the same way we grade pundits.

The PT Challenge is a contest designed to find the best prognosticators among our user base. The users with the Top 3 scores by June 30, 2013 will win the right to become Featured Pundits on PunditTracker. In other words, they will be able to make official predictions that the world can see, just like Jim Cramer, Bill O’Reilly, and Colin Cowherd. The Top 10 users, meanwhile, will each receive $25 gift cards for Amazon.com.

By voting “Likely” or “Unlikely”, you are effectively hedging your prediction, such that you will get less credit if you are right but also a reduced penalty if you are wrong.

Some other important notes:

You must make atleast 25 graded votes by 6/30/13 to be eligible (voting across categories is permitted)

Rankings will be based on our $1 Yield metric, which calibrates predictions for boldness. The more out-of-consensus your call, the more credit you receive if you are correct.

All your voting information can be found on the My Profile page.

The quickest way to surface the “voteable” calls on the website is to click on the category page (Finance, Politics, Sports) and then sort by “Vote Until.”

For “negative” calls (e.g. Mitt Romney will NOT win the election), voting “Definitely” means you are agreeing with the pundit (Romney will not win), while voting “No Way” means you disagree (Romney will win).

Update (April 2013): The current “PT Challenge” ends on June 30, 2013, but we plan to make this a recurring contest each year (on a cumulative prediction basis). Therefore, we would caution users against making a bunch of low-conviction votes simply to hit the 25 prediction threshold by this June.

Comments

comments

2 Comments

When you launched this new feature, did you reset everyone’s predictions? Because I had at least a dozen, and they are all gone. And since some of them have closed, I can’t go back in and redo them either.